Why Don’t You Pick EmberJS When Building Your Next Single-Page Application?

Oct 22, 2016

I’ve been using EmberJS on a daily basis for over a year now. In this short article, I will focus on some benefits of choosing the EmberJS framework as a tool for building a single-page application (SPA). I will mostly describe business advantages of that choice rather than technical benefits.

To begin with, I want to highlight that the EmberJS framework has a pretty steep learning curve in comparison to its competitors such as React.js and Angular( I mentioned React.js, but in fact, React is more like a library than a complete solution as it requires some additional extensions to achieve the same things as EmberJS or Angular). Even if it has the steep learning curve, it will pay off the time invested into learning Ember.

Predictable

While you plan your software related business, you should determinate potential risks. When you select a given solution, you don’t want to change it in the near future for some other one (because of costs, slowing down new features arrival, losing customers, potential new bugs, etc.).

The front-end world changes very rapidly. Because front-end tools are usually open sourced, the authors of these tools don’t need to support everything for a very single release. That drives us to the problems with upgrades. The EmberJS’s creators decided to address that concern of product owners. They have introduced a Long-Term Support (LTS) release channel of their product (with a 6-month support for the given version of the framework). But this is not the only difference in comparison to its competitors.

Structured

EmberJS follows the convention over configuration principle. Similarly to Ruby on Rails, there is a predefined structure that most developers follow. What does it mean for the product owner? In the case of changes in the development team, a new team member, who already knows EmberJS, can start to work on it sooner than before. He doesn’t have to learn as many team-specific practices as before because the tool enforces developers to use its rules. It also means that the human resource lock-in is smaller and it is easier to scale up/down your development team in the future.

Solid

EmberJS has gone through a long journey. The biggest changes have already taken place, and every new release makes it easier to migrate from one version to another. Moreover, following current version of the EmberJS framework is pretty straight forward. Another important remark: Pay attention to who is actually using EmberJS. There are plenty of big names involved in using and improving this solution, the list of whom you can find on Built With Ember. For the sake of example, I would mention Apple, Sony or GoDaddy.

To sum it up. If you really care about your business stability, consider my advice. I highly recommend the EmberJS framework as a tool for medium/large and single-page applications. Of course, it always depends on your development team preferences, such as a specific use case or some other aspects. However, don’t skip this solution at the beginning only because it seems to be too complex. Instead, check out EmberJS if you are looking for a solution which is likely to last for a long time.